STAR: speech therapy animation and imaging resource

Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) training and practice has been dominated by auditory and descriptive approaches. However, there is increasing evidence that vocal-tract visualisation can provide breakthroughs in intervention for speech sound disorders, e.g. through ultrasound tongue imaging visual biofeedback (UTI VB) (Sugden at al., 2019). UTI VB tools show huge potential in Speech Therapy, but are used rarely by SLTs. Studies involving Visual Animated Articulatory Models (VAAMs) in clinical settings also show that the provision of accurate visual models of the hidden speech articulators can have a breakthrough role in remediation of speech sound disorders (Massaro et al., 2004; Roxburgh, 2018), but quality and accuracy of commercial VAAMs is a potential issue.
The Speech Therapy Animation and imaging Resource (STAR) www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/speechstar/ is a Web-based, anglophone Speech and Language Therapy resource, under development, that will host over 1,000 videos, collected by speech researchers over the past ten years, showing the visible and hidden movements of speech articulators, using (i) UTI with lip camera video, (ii) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and MRI-based animation (animated frame-by-frame to match midsagittal vocal-tract movements). The STAR resource focuses on children’s speech and language therapy and comprises of (1) a teaching and training website, which will host UTI videos of disordered and nondisordered child speech, nondisordered adult speech, and MRI videos of modelled speech (2) an in-clinic website hosting vocal-tract animations to aid speech therapy and speech practise at home.
STAR will be the first resource of its kind, providing SLTs, students and teachers, with examples of imaged and animated vocal-tract movement in disordered and nondisordered speech corpora. STAR also aims to improve SLTs familiarity with UTI technology. The sites will be designed with input from a Clinical Advisory panel of SLTs, and SLT trainers and will be evaluated by users during a beta launch phase.